Artistic Production Belongs To The Changing World Of Things

An Interview with remarkable Mr. Velimir Abramović (Belgrade, Serbia), a Tesla scholar and an Akashic erudite. We are talking about theatre and contemporary arts.

Prof. Dr. Velimir Abramović is a Serbian philosopher of science, theorist of art, professor, author, and a regional specialist in the life, work, and scientific legacy of Nikola Tesla. He is also the brother of internationally renowned artist Marina Abramović. Born in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1952, he graduated from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts at the University of Arts in Belgrade in 1975. In 1983, he obtained a Master’s degree in Cultural Theory from the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Belgrade, with a thesis on The Dialectics of Contemporary Art. In 1985, he received his PhD in Philosophy of Science from the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Skopje, Macedonia, with a doctoral dissertation entitled The Problem of Continuity in the Natural Philosophy of Leibniz and Boscovich. Abramović has held professorships in Aesthetics, Philosophy of Art, Film Theory, and Film History at the University of Arts in Belgrade, as well as teaching interdisciplinary studies of the history of ideas and concepts of time, space, and matter in the natural sciences. From 2004 to 2007, he served as Dean of the Academy of Arts in Belgrade. He was the founder and editor-in-chief of the bilingual philosophical and scientific journal Tesliana (1992–1994). His research and writing focus particularly on Nikola Tesla, the philosophy of science, natural philosophy, time, consciousness, cosmology, and the relationship between science, art, and spirituality. He is the author of numerous books and scholarly works, including The Light That Never Goes Out (2009), Tesla – The Evolution of Human Consciousness (2017/2018), The Problem of Continuity in the Natural Philosophy of Leibniz and Boscovich (2019), Flying to the Future (co-authored with Chinese professor Steve Law, 2019), Tesla versus JPMorgan and Einstein – The Rise of Spiritual Physics (2021), and the bilingual Serbian-Russian play Tesla’s Testament (2023). Abramović has lectured and presented his work internationally, including at Lomonosov Moscow State University and at the Historic World Energy Conference in India in 2024, where he delivered the opening address. In 2024, in cooperation with the Braća Karić Foundation, he founded “Tesla on Saturday at Noon,” a forum at Alfa BK University in Belgrade dedicated to philosophy, science, and art, including a seminar devoted to the theory and physics of the ether. In 2025, he founded the Laboratory for Psychophysical Research – Physics of the Soul in Belgrade. In 2024, he received the Universal Medal in Science and Spirituality Award in India.

Prof. Dr. Velimir Abramović and Marina Abramović. Photo credit Zorana Jevtić.

Ivanka Apostolova Baskar: Tesla often appears as a man who was thinking decades ahead of his time. When exploring his life and archives, at what moment do you most strongly sense this visionary dimension and do you recognize something similar in contemporary art?

Velimir Abramović: An original work of art and a scientific discovery originate from the same source. Discoveries in science are spiritual inspiration from higher planes of existence, because they do not arise from education, schooling, or from books. An example of this is Michael Faraday, who didn’t even go to school, but started a new field of physics, electromagnetic induction. Tesla never graduated from Graz, he was a spiritual engineer, today there are many independent researchers in the world who follow his path. Which art academy did Picasso graduate from? Both Michelangelo and Leonardo only learned trades from Ghirlandaio and Verrocchio, because spirituality and creativity cannot be learned, they come from above. Or there are none. He was twelve years old when he saw a drawing of a waterfall on Niagara and said to his uncle: “One day I will build a large mill on this river to generate electricity” and then constructed a model: a wooden turbine on a small stream in Tomin Gaj, a village in Lika near Smiljan. He received a definite intuition at the age of seventeen, when he read William Crooks’ book “Radiant matter” and felt and understood that he had to and will be an engineer. Scientific Discovery does not come from learning, has no logic and cannot be predicted. It is an artistic act in science.

IAB: Tesla combined intuition with radically rational thinking. What can his way of thinking teach contemporary artists who seek to engage with complex political, technological, and social issues?

VA: Tesla worked using eidetic images in a “mind laboratory” and whenever an imaginary apparatus worked in his mind, a copy of it would always work in reality. His visionary heuristic method can be compared in the history of art with Michelangelo and Mozart. In the marble rocks of the Carrara quarry, Michelangelo clearly saw the shapes of his future sculptures, saying of the raw pieces of marble “in this one there is a female figure, in the other a male one…” Mozart does not have a single correction in the original scores, because he saw them appearing in a flash of light in front of him and only copied them, already listening to the music of the astral orchestra of those future works. The world of ideas from which artistic creativity originates is above the level of mental images and emotions of political activism. Contemporary artists have a huge problem of exhaustion of artistic languages ​​because technology has produced an inflation of artistic representations and feelings. This started already with the invention of photography and film, and today it is drastically expressed in computer animation, human robots and artificial intelligence that writes poetry, paints and composes. Performance art is a rebellion against the technological conquest of the human artistic domain. In the performance, the artist must be personally present together with his audience. The disadvantage of this is that the modern conceptual artist thus becomes a classical theater actor and even a politician who normally pushes his personality before his work. In any case, we are witnessing the death of art as we once knew it, which Hegel, Walter Benjamin and Baudrillard had already predicted. Today’s truly first and great artists are not in the public eye at all, because after the valueless aesthetics of Joseph Kosuth and the dematerialization of the art object, no work in reality makes sense anymore. I personally know a genius artist who is that because he has a spiritual position, not because he paints, writes or is in the media. In contrast to purely Spiritual artists, who dream of nothing but ideas, which they do not formalize in any way, the entire currently manifested artistic production is just kitsch. In order to overcome the growing ability of modern technology, art must find new languages ​​as a means of transmitting artistic ideas to the audience, namely telepathy and direct neurostimulation of impressions and feelings, then cleaning the aura with light and sound or the frequency effect on the chakras, especially those outside the body. The physical artistic experiences of the audience can best be realized with time shift, in short, artists must first conquer the technical languages ​​of science and technology and enrich them with original creativity from the spiritual plane, in which art and science are one and the same.

IAB: Tesla believed that thought, like energy, could be transmitted and generate influence. Can artistic thought through theatre, visual art, or performance likewise become a kind of “intellectual current” capable of shifting collective consciousness?

VA: Unfortunately, not anymore. The past does not exist, it is only a memory and no matter how perfect the painting of a Titian or a Rubens, it does not motivate anyone to paint like that today. Maybe only falsifiers. A thought is literally an electromagnetic image in the brain and that’s why it has energy and should be transmitted directly, without intermediary forms of theater, visual arts or performance. People no longer trust their senses. In theater, for example, if an animated hologram is performed with seven lasers, you cannot in any case recognize that it is not the real actors, scenography, etc. A lot of work is already being done on interactive holography, when the audience will be able to walk up the ramp with these holographic phantoms and shake hands, to hug them with a full experience of reality. If thoughts are electromagnetic images, emotions are ionic currents in the nerves. The collective consciousness can be controlled much more easily and efficiently with “devices for electronic warfare” which are a derivative of the HAARP system and have been used here in Serbia for several decades. A rich range of collective moods can be instantly evoked by electronic means, from hatred and anger to adoration, delight and panicked fear. High art of the classical type, and also modern art, practically has no influence on the masses anymore. For this purpose, the brainwashing entertainment sector works most effectively; the best examples are America and China, not to mention Serbia, where the state directly sponsors fake art (kitsch) and especially high-performance sports instead of the ancient Greek sport of beauty and skill.

Prof. Dr. Velimir Abramović. Photo credit Lichtfelder.

IAB: In Tesla’s world, the invisible did not mean the unreal. While exploring his archives, have you ever sensed an “invisible imprint” of his energy and could this principle be compared to the intangible energy created between performer, stage, and audience?

VA: The universal medium in the entire Cosmos is exclusively light. Atoms exchange light with each other. This is their natural language. Luminous. Human auras are made of light (invisible to our physiological eyes). We cannot hear Beethoven’s opera Fidelio as a mechanical instrumental sound, because our brain does not receive mechanical waves until they are converted into light in the middle ear, i.e. into electromagnetic impulses, because that is the only way the center in the brain can receive and hear them as tones. So, who loads that light and listens to it like Beethoven’s music? Consciousness, our consciousness. What is real is what does not change, it is always the same, and that is only the present moment which is eternal. Unfortunately, artistic production belongs to the changing world of things. Every epoch has its own form of art. The performance is the exchange of bioenergetic radiations, literally – the exchange of personal light information, which in the case of charismatic personalities of the artists is very interesting for those present. How else to explain that it is entertaining for the audience to listen in silence carefully to John Cage who plays one and the same note on the piano for over two hours. It’s not about culture; it’s about the spiritual animation of the performer. The same applies to Marina Abramović and Ulay Laysiepen, who silently sat at a table in galleries around the world for hours and days holding the attention of visitors. Or for Marina’s solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York “The artist is present,” where she sat alone at the table and people across from her took turns, which was visited by 750,000 people. Tesla spoke in a high-pitched voice, almost falsetto, but very quietly and hypnotically attractive. No matter how much company there was, when Tesla entered the room, he would instantly be the central figure and attract all the attention.

IAB: Tesla sought to transform natural energy into a force for humanity. Can contemporary art do something analogous transforming fear, conflict, political tension, or collective trauma into a new form of social consciousness?

VA: It can rightly be said that from the 18th century until the advent of the Internet and other information technologies, art ruled the subconscious of the people, encouraged individual freedoms, libertarian social movements and awakening practically pioneering the elevation of the collective consciousness of many nations. This was the case from the French Revolution in 1789, through the October Revolution in 1917, until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which Andy Warhol did not experience. We clearly see that contemporary art does not have that power or role; it is on the margins of the evolution of humanity’s consciousness and hides in the studios, not having any idea or real answer to terrorism, wars, genocide and the worldwide proliferation of the vulgar entertainment sector. And worse than that, instead of artists, philosophers and scientists creating the consciousness of Man on Earth, special secret services are doing it today, successfully using artists and intellectuals as agents of influence, insinuators and simple operatives in the field. It is necessary to conclude that the artists allowed the level of philosophical acts of manipulation of the secret services to exceed the level of artistic ideas. And of course, entities of a higher order primarily rule over entities of a lower order. In the dramatic and visual arts, it is especially evident that not even art critics, but curators and the method of financing determine the meaning and direction of artistic work.

IAB: Do you believe there is an invisible thread connecting science, art, and global politics and is Tesla one of the most powerful historical figures through whom we can perceive that connection?

VA: Certainly, there is an “invisible thread connecting science, art, and global politics,” it is faith, a religious image of the world that connects and transforms them through millennia and centuries. A scientist is only a conductor of cosmological laws into human consciousness and knowledge, an artist is a means of realizing his artistic idea, and politics is a socio-historical effect of their esoteric insights and agreements of small groups in darkness and silence. J.V. Stalin introduced the conspiracy as an explanation of historical events, which was recognized by American historiography. Tesla is the Jesus Christ of our scientific and technological civilization. This is not strange because every religion has its own human incarnation: in the Aryan religion it is Rama, in Mazdeism Zarathustra, in Hinduism Krishna, in Buddhism Buddha, in Judaism Moses, in Islam Muhammad. In Christianity, since the eleventh century we even have two Jesuses, Catholic and Orthodox, not to mention his Protestant versions. In his prophetic article The World System from 1900, as well as in the articles The Problem of Increasing Human Energy and How Cosmic Forces Shape Human Destinies, Tesla laid the foundations of a scientific form of religiosity. Together with Swami Vivekananda, Tesla began to translate the philosophical faith of Advaita Vedanta (non-dual true knowledge) into the real world through his inventions. Today, we materially and mentally live the civilization that he imagined and equipped for realization with his fundamental technological inventions. Information and neuro technologies dictate both art and politics. The white man’s Christian civilization has completed its historical mission and the Tesliana civilization is on the rise, heralded by spiritual physics that will profoundly deal with Spirit and Soul in addition to matter. The Teslian civilization will replace political, diplomatic and state structures with the consciousness and objective morality of cosmological laws. It will be a super-religion for the whole of humanity, which will naturally unite east and west, north and south, at the same time rationally and irrationally overcoming all existing contradictions. This is not my dream; this is very much happening right now. It is evident: Technically, global society largely functions with information technologies, all eight billion people. Not only the collective consciousness, but also the world of the humanist elite and artistic expression lags behind this simple fact.

IAB: Tesla created much of his work in profound personal solitude, yet his ideas had a universal horizon. Can solitude sometimes be a condition for vision and how can a contemporary artist transform personal isolation into work of global significance?

VA: Spiritual physics provides a crystal-precise explanation for this: the ionosphere is the collective brain of humanity and the Planet and at the same time the general memory of all living beings and the Earth’s geophysical system. Positive and negative ionospheric ion currents are of the same type as our nerve currents. Us and the Ionosphere are connected by a common harmonic – the Schumann field frequency of 7.83 Hz. It is a standing electromagnetic field between the Ionosphere and the Earth, to which all living systems are tuned during evolution. (Evolution exists. It is not continuous, but happens in jumps, a series of mutations, which can be reductionist or lead to complexity.). Solitude in the forest, desert, or at least in your attic allows you to connect with the earthly Akasha chronicle, which further connects us with the cosmic Akasha. If the artist draws ideas from these fields of knowledge, he automatically sends them instantly through the light Ether (electromagnetic spectrum) to the brains of all resonant individuals. This is how artistic ideas, as well as all other ideas, spread. The blowing of some of them is timed depending on the human receiver. This is what loneliness is for and how it helps creation. That is why true geniuses, as Tesla, work alone, undisturbed, and the highest value and true meaning of what they have created is understood and recognized only after their death, often after centuries have passed. What I am saying is not reducing the Divine properties of artistic creation to physicalism. I discovered that at the basis of the history of art and aesthetics are sacred mathematics and spiritual physics. (Above all: Da Vinci code: 0.618 for the internal division of the unit, 1.618 for the beginning of the Fibonacci sequence). It is interesting that since 1992 the number of the international telephone call for Serbia (00…381) has been the square of the small golden ratio (0.618 x 0.618 = 0.381). In that year, Serbia began to receive the world’s most famous Serbian visual artist ever, my sister Marina Abramović.

IAB: Tesla had an almost mystical relationship with the universe, yet expressed it through experiment and technology. Do you see a parallel with the contemporary performance artist who, through the body, space, and technology, establishes a dialogue with something larger than the self?

VA: The best answer to this question is certainly the spiritual etheric connection between the most globally influential performer, Marina Abramović, and the founder of Scientific Religion, Nikola Tesla, whose only energy trace is preserved in the urn (Tesla’s belongings were burned, not Tesla, because Tesla’s mummified body was taken to Russia in 1944 and laid under Lenin). When I found out, I was as surprised as you are now, as you read this.

Filming in secret: Marina Abramović performed and recorded this performance in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade in strict secrecy at the end of 2003, after spending almost 30 years outside the country. At that moment, the public did not attend the act itself.

The main motif in the photos: The most famous and artistically valuable photo shows Marina Abramović kneeling in front of the golden urn with Nikola Tesla’s ashes. She keeps her hands close to the urn (but never touches it), in deep concentration, trying to mentally “absorb” and transfer the energy of the great scientist. This large-format black-and-white chromogenic photograph was later exhibited around the world and sold at prestigious art auctions such as Phillips Auction House.

Marina Abramovic Count on Us Tesla. Photo credit Artsy

Marina Abramovic Count on Us Tesla. Photo credit Pinterest.

IAB: Tesla connected scientific power with moral responsibility. Does the artist today also have a moral obligation to act as an “ethical sensor” of society, particularly when working with politics, technology, war, climate change, or inequality?

VA: An artist is not a creator, but rather a recreator, who can only change the forms of one and the same essence. Why? Because the infinity which represents the wholeness of our World is essence without form, and all forms are finite and internal. Let’s observe the level of the human Spirit and Soul: politicians and generals, for example, are mentally healthy people, with social intelligence and organizers, but they are seriously ill Spiritually, because they are liars and murderers, associated with destructive and criminal ideas. On the other hand, it is the other way around with real great artists: they are mentally in severe pain and extremely sensitive, often mentally or nervously ill, but spiritually they are completely healthy and bright people, not to mention Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Van Gogh…

Ethics is a human category and does not express cosmic justice. The behavior of any person, even an artist, stems from the automatism of cosmic laws, and if an artist really wants to not make mistakes in the absolute sense, this is only possible if he does nothing, not only does not get involved socially, but also stays away from any material expression. Of course, this is not entirely possible, so in case we are already living beings, we need to consciously adjust all our reactions to external actions so that they soon give zero. In our relative world, it is the only way to copy perfection and bring it into everyday life. This is what all holy people in the East aspire to, so artists should too. Ego is the Devil who makes the artist a seller of himself. Social recognition, ambition and striving for a great career are serious psychological disorders that are the source of great mental suffering for artists. They should stick only to the Spirit, and forget and exclude the soul and matter involvement. And like the Dalai Lama of Tibet literally said in the 1980s in an Amsterdam interview with Louwrien Wijers: “When artists achieve a higher consciousness, they themselves will give up any artistic work…” This applies to man in general. Karl Marx speaks in the same sense at the end of the third volume of Capital: “Only beyond the labor process, the realm of freedom opens…”

IAB: Where do science and art intersect most intensely today in digital media, VR, interactive installations, artificial intelligence, or new stage technologies? And which of these developments would be closest to Tesla’s vision and which might represent its complete opposite?

VA: Art and contemporary media meet only superficially, because artists are late with the elevation and widening of consciousness and self-cognition, so they mostly use modern media only for the presentation and registration of classical artistic ideas. Digital means deprive artists of their main advantages, which were in skills: AI animation replaces cartoonists, painters, even acting, the day is not far when dramatic arts will become completely virtual. That’s why I say that the future is in the replacement of every, even artistic physical work, with the spiritual position of the artist in the world of ideas and mental activities in the Astral world, in which emotions are the main vehicle. The art of the future will take place in the interaction of the mental plane, in which intuition is the vehicle, and the emotional Astral level, whose substance is the Elemental; human thoughts are molds for elemental beings, which become independent and live as our emotions. Tesla’s vision of the unity of science, art and philosophy is realized without a trace. This is opposed by naive humanists and reactionary theologians and primitive believers who see machines and technology in general as some kind of evil force, instead of helping the human race to rise above slavery to natural forces and ignorance. If artificial intelligence surpasses us humans, just as children can and should surpass their parents, isn’t it fair, natural and normal for this higher intelligence to replace us? The narratological type of art is disappearing, becoming boring, because all human stories are repeated, they are shown. The story is replaced by a philosophical attitude towards reality in general, metaphysical questions are raised, in which the film takes the lead: Star Wars (1-8), Matrix (1-4), Lucy (1-2). The underground physics of Ether, which esotericists deal with, will soon become the philosophical-scientific art of the new age.

IAB: Can a contemporary performance, theatrical work, or visual installation function as a “transformer” not of electrical energy, but of social energy and move beyond the artistic space to influence broader cultural or political processes?

Prof. Dr. Velimir Abramović. Painting by Igor Iskandaroff.

VA: The most profound change in our world does not come from the art sector, it never did. Didn’t painters (Claude Monet, August Renoir…) start to insist on impression and color when black and white photography was developed, so the realistic representation of classicist painting became difficult and redundant? If today’s artists, who have missed the line of development of civilization, are expected to influence social events, it is completely unrealistic. Because of their lost position as once important critics of, for example, Nazism (Thomas Mann), Communism (Alexander Solzhenitsyn), militaristic capitalism (John Lennon, Andy Warhol), artists remain themselves, traditionally egoistically separate, locked in the ideals of the past, rejecting the rapidly developing transhumanism as a negation of their being.

IAB: Which aspect of Tesla’s world remains insufficiently understood today, yet might prove most significant for the future of art, science, and humanity’s relationship with technology?

VA: What not only the human mass, but also the corrupt scientific quasi-elite, the CERN, Oxford, MIT and Stanford clergy of our time do not understand is the perspective of the development of Tesla’s science, which is a radically and fundamentally new civilization on Earth: CIVILIZATION TESLIYANA ALGORITHM.

Conceived experiments: “Free Energy“, Ether Resonant Generator based on semiconductors and the functioning of tunnel effects of LEDs; the transfer of human work for the maintenance of life to artificial intelligence with the embedded ethics of harmonizing life and cosmic conditions of existence; control of general time coordination of bio and physical systems based on additional magnetic pulse fields; the basic principle of the time machine construction: the electromagnetic oscillatory field of the environment is the reference present, the planet Earth, etc. (The object of time travel is a crystal with its own internal oscillation time. Crystal oscillations are synchronized, timed to the present environment. Let’s turn on the additional field of Tesla’s transformer. Thus, we create a new local present in a controlled field. Consequently, the structure of the reference field is synchronized with the new local field and displays a different time. Briefly, the time machine is a complex of electromagnetic fields of special resonant mathematics.). Fusion of particles from the electromagnetic spectrum: electrons, protons and neutrons and further building of any atoms of Periodic table of chemical elements based on direct lasers interaction. Note: The exposed fundamental principles of Time Physics (also Ether Physics) are theoretical and experimental basis of temporal technology and Ether engineering (to develop further).

To survive at all within this New Age program, art must integrate itself by synthesizing aesthetic axiology with the cosmological morality of the inviolable metaphysical laws of physics. Only artists, scientists, and philosophers united in universal consciousness cosmic patriots whose homeland is the Universe rather than the delusions of past centuries will remain connected to the creative core of emanation.

IAB: If Tesla could enter into a dialogue with a contemporary artist today, what do you think would fascinate him more: our technology or the fact that humanity still struggles to develop an ethical framework capable of keeping pace with its technological power?

VA:  If he could engage in a real-time dialogue with contemporary artists, something that will certainly soon be possible via a “spirit box,” Tesla would surely feel a mixture of admiration and pity. Admiration for their naivety and persistence in remaining true to themselves in a completely transformed world, and pity for their efforts to create something new and original on the physical plane in a world where, it is dreadful to say, a 3D printer can effortlessly sculpt Michelangelo’s statues. Regarding the struggle to preserve humanity and ethics, one must understand the following: everything human is of cosmic origin, yet everything cosmic lies far beyond human comprehension. One should strive for the alignment of mind and reality wherein, according to Thomas Aquinas, truth resides. Unaware of their true nature, artists seek to change the world, yet in reality, they are instruments played by cosmic laws, while they strongly believe the music is their own. The mythical poet Orpheus knew full well that he was merely a conduit for Divine poetry for creation itself. Yet, today, that has been forgotten, and poets sign their names before they even write the poem…

IAB: In an age of climate crisis, energy inequality, and accelerating technological change, do we need a new “Tesla principle” a vision that transcends short-term interests and profit? And what role could artists play in shaping such a vision?

VA: Artists today should do nothing, for by doing anything they merely provide an alibi for the evil forces of technology. They ought to become holy figures who contemplate and influence their surroundings from the etheric plane. Tesla’s principle was to transform visions into useful gadgets that make daily life easier for humanity. This was a way to persuade people to embrace the new era of science, technology, and planetary communication. That process is now complete, for we are living in that era. What matters most now is raising our awareness, because the mindless, profit-driven application of technology and weapons production is beginning to threaten the beauty and natural comfort of humanity’s small cosmic vehicle Planet Earth. Ideas themselves operate like natural laws; if we connect them to the Ether through our consciousness and thought, they will inevitably manifest on the physical plane. We do not need superfluous effort now, but rather deep meditation, contemplation, and thinking aligned with those ideas. This is the activity that will transform circumstances and program events in accordance with our true need to harmonize with the cosmic environment. We must not attempt to dominate, for then we put ourselves against infinity and that is a game we cannot win.

IAB: Finally, if you were to create a contemporary work inspired by Tesla a theatre piece, visual installation, performance, or technological experiment what would you want it to say to the 21^st century about energy, genius, humanity, and the future?

VA:  Given that there is but one single time of physical reality an eternal present, a ceaseless “now”, and given that all matter is composed of light, I will construct a light-based genetic clock corrector: a regenerator akin to the one the Great Architect of All Worlds God the Creator implanted in a certain immortal jellyfish, a creature that reproduces, rejuvenates, reproduces again, and never dies. Then, our illusory and temporary earthly existence will also be brought into harmony with real cosmic time the constant present of our experience.

IAB: Thank you very much, dear Mr. Velimir Abramović.

(Belgrade/Skopje, 2026)